The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Hello, Stranger. Did you miss me?

Let's talk about Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

The Short of It

Plot: Perhaps an interactive children's textbook is the only tool powerful enough to break the constraints of a feudal cyberpunk dystopia.
Page Count: 499
Award: 1996 Hugo, 1996 Locus SF
Worth a read: Yes.
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Pass
Technobabble: Hot damn.
Review: Feudal. Fantasy. Cyberpunk. Dystopia. Cool! Compelling characters with convincing drives successfully ground some pretty outlandish SF concepts. Book spends extended swathes in its own fiction as depicted by the Primer - but does so in a way that illuminates real-world issues. Pacing leans a bit too rushed, particularly in the third act. Classic Stephenson: excellent writing, often opaque, totally gripping.


The Medium of It
Spoiler Free!

From start to finish there was no point at which, had I been asked what would transpire next, I could have given a correct answer. There is just a whole lot going on, all at once, all the time.

Neal Stephenson does not always write the most interesting stories. This is not meant in a disparaging way: the familiarity of his chosen story beats allows him to show off the worlds that he has devised. The same is often true of his characters: they are pure unadulterated archetypes, distilled to remove impurities. 

For The Diamond Age this means that it is a challenge to offer a simple plot summary that does not woefully undersell how engaging the book is. Because in one line, the plot would be: "A girl escapes her abusive home in search of belonging." Which is pretty lackluster. 

And yet. We do not find ourselves bogged down by motivations. We are not stuck trying to rationalize impossible choices are awaiting a miraculous twist of fate. In many ways, the story is not there for us. It is there as a framework for everything else that Stephenson aims to do. That's not to say that there are not twists and turns along the way. Lots of things happen, we have some fun action scenes, all of that. But again, that's not what we're here for.

We're here to see what happens to a world totally taken over by incredibly powerful nanotechnology, machinery so powerful that it can simply produce... anything. We're here to see how societies fracture when the collaborative drive to survive is undercut by machines. We want to know how people cope as individuals when, for the most part, it is almost impossible to make a meaningful contribution to society. The Diamond Age does an admirable job with both interesting questions and intriguing answers.

At points this means that plot becomes an after thought. Time jumps and rushed transitions flit us from one place to the next as Stephenson shows off as much of his world as possible. On the whole this works fine. Things are, broadly speaking, interesting enough throughout. Whether or not this book works for someone is probably purely a matter of taste. There are extended pseudoscientific ramblings - truly next level technobabble. But there are also some brilliant bits of society building as well as tech. There are charming explorations of a fantasy world used as an education tool.

This is not the best or worst book from this challenge. But it was both enjoyable and different enough to kick me out of my torpor and get me writing again. 

If you want to get into this one, consider using the link below! I'll get a few cents at no extra cost to you.

The Long of It
Spoilers Ahead!

The most enjoyable parts of this book are the fantasy diversions inside Primer. The whole purpose of this book is to teach children and it adapts to their real-world situations. From an authorship side this is a brilliant choice - it provides an in-world explanation for why these fantasy stories line up so perfectly with what is going on. None of that "wait a second, didn't I hear a tangentially related story with a life lesson from my grandfather once?" No, the book knows, and it reacts, and it should fit to anything.

An added layer of this is that the Primer speaks to Nell. This is done by having a real live actor doing the lines remotely. Again, brilliant writing. It brings a human element to the whole situation.

These fantasy parts get a bit heavy handed. In particular once we get to Castle Turing and the Duke of Turing. Yeah, we get it, she's learning how logic gates and programming can function. It's a bit odd - usually Stephenson is content to leave you to figure things out yourself. This can be a problem but at least it feels like he appreciates that his readers can think. Here? A bit on the nose. It's still fun, though. Nell needs to figure out if she is speaking to a human or a machine and, after sending a poem:
The answer came back much too quickly, and it was the same answer as always: “I do so envy your skill with words. Now, if you do not object, let us turn our attention to the inner workings of the Turing machine.”
She had made it as obvious as she dared, and the Duke still hadn't gotten the message. He must be a machine.

It's clever. This is the first of the more complex machines that Nell encounters, working her way up to the top, where she learns that everything is a single massive Turing machine. Everything is just response conditions that have been preprogrammed into the greatest of calculating machines. 

He bore a controlled look of exasperation. “What was your purpose in coming here?”

“To obtain the twelfth key.”

“Anything else?”

“To learn about Wizard 0.2.”

“Ah.”

“To discover whether it was, in fact, a Turing machine.”

“Well, you have your answer. Wizard 0.2 is most certainly a Turing machine—the most powerful ever built.”

“And the Land Beyond?”

“All grown from seeds. Seeds that I invented.”

“And it is also a Turing machine, then? All controlled by Wizard 0.2?”

“No,” said King Coyote. “Managed by Wizard. Controlled by me.”

“But the messages in the Cipherers' Market control all the events in the Land Beyond, do they not?”

“You are most perceptive, Princess Nell.”

“Those messages came to Wizard—just another Turing machine.”

“Open the altar,” said King Coyote, pointing to a large brass plate with a keyhole in the middle.

Princess Nell used her key to open the lock, and King Coyote flipped back the lid of the altar. Inside were two small machines, one for reading tapes and one for writing them.

“Follow me,” said King Coyote, and opened a trapdoor set into the floor behind the altar.

Princess Nell followed him down a spiral staircase into a small room. The connecting rods from the altar came down into this room and terminated at a small console.

“Wizard is not even connected to the altar! It does nothing,” Princess Nell said.

“Oh, Wizard does a great deal. It helps me keep track of things, does calculations, and so on. But all of that business up there on the stage is just for show—just to impress the commoners. When a message comes here from the Cipherers' Market, I read it myself, and answer it myself.

“So as you can see, Princess Nell, the Land Beyond is not really a Turing machine at all. It's actually a person—a few people, to be precise. Now it's all yours.”

Wait a second. Could this fantasy world be a reflection of her real one? Where massive amounts of information and computers control almost all aspects of life? Crazy! 

This would have been a cool place to wrap up. Instead things go absolutely cuckoo bananas.

  • Radical military takes over
  • Nell gets kidnapped
  • The mouse army that she formed in her fantasy world turns out to be real orphan girls who were raised by a crime lord to fight for freedom
  • Nell is rescued by her army
  • Nell rescues her mom from an underwater hive-mind orgy
  • Organic computer utopia may become real
I'm leaving out some stuff. But this all happens in the last ten percent of the book. It's like Stephenson forgot that he had to wrap up a bunch of storylines, checked his watch, and decided that he needed at least seven done before dinner. To be fair: there's a lot of foreshadowing to set up these things. But the speed at which everything comes together is too much.

It's not like Nell heard a bell ringing.

Is there a cooler sentence that cyberpunk feudal fantasy dystopia, Stranger?
And don't forget to read a book!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Don't Forget to Read a Book!

Queen of Angels by Greg Bear

Bid Time Return (Somewhere in Time) by Richard Matheson